Privacy

What the site itself stores about you

Nothing that identifies you. There is no sign-up, no newsletter, no comment box and no shopping basket. The search box and the calculators take what you type in the address bar so that a result has a URL you can share — /tools/name-rank?name=Delia&year=1974 — and that is the whole of it. The one thing kept after the page is served is a count, described next, and it is not attached to you.

The web server keeps ordinary access logs, as every web server does: the IP address the request came from, the time, the page asked for, and the browser’s user-agent string. They are used to keep the site running and to find broken pages, and they are not combined with anything else or passed to anybody.

Advertising

The site carries advertising from Google AdSense. Google and its partners use cookies and similar identifiers to serve and measure those ads, and where you have allowed it, to choose ads based on your previous visits to this and other sites. That is Google’s processing rather than this site’s: nothing about it reaches a database here.

You can turn personalised advertising off for your Google account at My Ad Center, and see how Google uses data from sites that use its services at policies.google.com.

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, a consent message appears before any personalised advertising is served, and your answer is remembered so it is not asked again. You can reopen it and change your mind from the link in the footer of the ad message itself.

The “read this week” counts

The front page lists the name and surname pages people have been reading, and the search page lists the searches that came up most. Those need counting, so there is one table in the database that this site writes to. It holds three things: a date, which page or search term it was, and a number.

It holds nothing else — no IP address, no browser, no referrer, no identifier of any kind, and no clock time beyond the day. Two people reading the same page are stored as the number 2, which is indistinguishable from one person reading it twice. There is nothing in the table that could be traced back to a visit, because nothing about the visit is ever written down.

Rows older than seven days are deleted outright. Search terms are recorded only when the search actually matched a name in the records, and only in the reduced letters-and-digits form the search box uses, so something typed into the wrong box never reaches the table at all.

Names of real people

The statistics here are about names, not about the people who hold them. The Social Security Administration files carry counts and years and nothing else: no addresses, no dates of birth, no individuals. Names given to fewer than five babies in a year are not published at all, which is the SSA’s own protection against a rare name identifying one child, and this site cannot undo it because it never had the numbers.

The one place individuals are named is the “notable people” block on name and surname pages. Those come from Wikidata, they are people with a Wikipedia article in at least one language, and the only facts shown are the ones already in that article: name, a one-line description, and years of birth and death. If you are on that list and would rather not be, write to tomhamilton14@gmail.com and the entry will be removed.

Other people’s sites

Pages link out to Wiktionary, Wikipedia, Wikidata and the statistics offices the data came from. Once you follow one of those links you are on their site under their policy, not this one.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this, or a request to see or delete something: tomhamilton14@gmail.com.